Last night, Jon Stewart did a pretty devastating segment on conservative pundits who are now complaining about fat-cat teachers with their $51,000 salaries and saying they ought to sacrifice, but not too long ago defended to the death the right of people who earn over a quarter of a million dollars a year not to have their marginal income tax raised by a few points, and also said it was abominable to suggest that top executives at Wall Street banks taking taxpayer bailouts ought to have their salaries and bonuses limited:
It's great that The Daily Show is around to heap some scorn on these blowhards, but it won't really do them much harm. One thing they understand very well at Fox, and in the conservative movement more generally, is the political value of shamelessness. As long as you say what you're saying with conviction, it doesn't matter how absurd or hypocritical it is. You may not get the majority of the public to agree with you, but you can get a good number. And among the functions Fox serves for the right (along with conservative talk radio) is the rapid dissemination of arguments and a model of argumentation. They tell conservatives not just what they should say, but how they should say it. A key component is that every argument is presented without a shred of doubt, and with a clear delineation between heroes and villains, the people we should be celebrating and the ones we should be hating.
As a result, conservatives may not win every argument, but they almost never get routed completely. And they manage to keep the debate from moving too far away from where they'd like to be. Right now, at a time when the public's preferred solutions to the budget deficit run to raising taxes on rich people and cutting defense spending, those kinds of things are not even being considered. Instead, the administration and Republicans are arguing about just how much they should screw the middle class and the poor (Republicans say a lot, Democrats say some, but not as much).
